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Review - CEN Ford F-450 Super Duty

Who needs a big old long oversized truck to handle their scale hauling needs? We have the Ford F-450 Super Duty dually in the house. This is a big 1/10 scale sized four-wheel drive truck that at the heart is a solid axle trail truck rig, while looking the heavy-duty part with a one-of-a-kind officially licensed Ford F-450 Super Duty body. So, let's check it out now before we go drive and speed run this heavy-duty hauler.

CEN Ford F-450 Batteries

We need to point out that this is a ready-to-run truck that comes assembled with the electronics, the painted body, and an included transmitter. No work is needed to get this truck moving but the transmitter does require four AA batteries, and the truck requires a 2S or 3S LiPo battery pack.

Fuji EnviroMAX AA Super Alkaline Battery

Venom Power 2S 30C Hard Case LiPo Battery

Venom Power 3S 35C LiPo Battery

SkyRC GPS Speed Meter & Data Logger

How fast is the CEN Ford F-450?

In terms of top speed we velcro’d our GPS speed meter in the bed of the truck and installed a 3S LiPo and were able to achieve a 14 mile an hour top speed. With the 2S LiPo we hit a whopping 10 miles per hour. It may not be very fast but it has big hauling torque which you can change to have more top speed but we'll talk about that later.

Learn more about the SkyRC GPS speed meter.

CEN Ford F-450 Two Piece Body

This heavy-duty hauler comes equipped with the officially licensed Ford F-450 Super Duty body which is two lexan pieces. One for the cab and one for the bed and then they've been secured together in the middle with screws and washers. Once secured this is a big body with a 17.6” wheelbase, in fact the truck is over 26” long and over 11” wide, so it needed a big old body, and this F-450 Super Duty fits the bill. For size comparison here it is next to a standard 12.3 inch trail truck the Enduro Trail Runner.

You'll notice the Super Duty has a lot of decals used all throughout to highlight the grille, lights, windows, and other scale details to make this body look as real as possible to the full-size truck. Then to make the body seem just a little more realistic there are big oversized hard plastic side mirrors with reflective decals found on each one and you'll also find hard plastic wipers on the windshield.

CEN Ford F-450 Wheels & Tires

To finish off the scale look of this Super Duty truck there are the officially licensed American Force H01 Contra Wheels mounted to Fury low profile Country Hunter tires which are officially licensed through Fury off-road tires. These tires are glued to the wheel with the wheel secured to a hub with 10 screws then the hubs are attached to the axle via 12mm plastic hex and a 4mm nut.

CEN Ford F-450 Chassis

If we pop the body off, you'll see that this just looks like a stretch trail truck with a 17.6” wheelbase. To achieve this, the steel frame rail is actually three different pieces being secured together to give you that stretch length.
Toward the back of the truck is this big plastic battery box that uses two hook and loop straps with cutouts in the front and rear to accommodate any 2S or 3S LiPo battery that you may want to use or perhaps a NiMh pack if you prefer.

CEN Ford F-450 Servo

As we move up front you can see the electronics, we have a chassis mounted servo—it's said to be made by Savox although the front doesn't have a model number, but it has 12kg a centimeter of torque or 167 ounce inches of torque.

CEN Ford F-450 ESC

For our electronic speed control (ESC) it is a HobbyWing WP-1040, 40amp brushed ESC. It is waterproof and there's a T-style connector attached. It also has a voltage cut off for LiPo and for NiMh batteries, but it's set from the factory to LiPo mode so if you want to use nickel metal batteries with this ESC, you'll need to move that jumper into the NiMh mode. The receiver box above the ESC is sealed up with some screws on the lid and it looks like it's waterproof.

CEN Ford F-450 Motor

Our Super Duty features a 550 size can brush motor and it also uses 32 pitch pinion and spur gear with a slipper assembly inside. Next to the motor is our transmission it's a standard three gear transmission with metal gears inside.
The speeds we mentioned earlier were from the high torque settings. If you have it in high-speed mode your top speeds will increase but if you're doing some hauling or big loading applications, like this truck is intended for, you're going to want to keep your transmission in the high-torque setup.

Pro Tip: “Although the transmission can have the gearing slightly changed it's set from the factory in the high-torque mode. To switch from high-torque, just pop one of the gears out and reverse its direction, then adjust the gear spacing and put it all back together—now you're in high-speed mode.”

CEN Ford F-450 Shocks and Sway Bars

The last thing to mention is the plastic shocks with threaded spring adjuster nuts and they're mounted up on these stamp steel shock hoops. The shocks are oil filled and they're pretty smooth, so it gives the truck quite a bit of suspension. However, it doesn't allow the shocks to have too much suspension articulation or flex because the truck is equipped with sway bars on the front and rear. Which will help the truck stay flat when you're driving it and help prevent any torque twist on the front end when you're pulling a load. These sway bar arms attach to the metal post that goes through the chassis via a wire and each side has a wire through the plastic arm connecting the post.

Pro Tip: “When we unboxed our truck one of those rear arms was missing the wire. To fix it is we simply took a 1.5mm L-shaped Allen wrench (there's one included with the truck), and we stuck it through the post and arm, and it fit. So, we just measured up how much length we needed, Dremeled off the L on the Allen wrench and stuck it through the arm and tightened it up. Within five minutes we're able to fix that sway bar. We weren't sure if that metal wire was installed on the truck or somehow fell out during shipping but we couldn't find it, Luckily this was a pretty quick and easy fix.”

CEN Ford F-450 Suspension

Now if we flip over the truck, you get a good look at everything else including our three-link suspension on the front and rear. Like we mentioned there is a CMS chassis mounted servo, a steel skid plate here and then our driveshaft shooting to the back. In the front you can see our rear driveshaft extender that has a dog bone in it to power those rear tires. You also get a good look at all the plastic braces that are connecting the two chassis rails to make the whole chassis pretty stiff except at the very ends where there is some flex.

Lastly you get a good look at our axles underneath. They are a multi-piece design and have a removable diff cover. The front driveshafts are dog bones but they're not bad looking axles and they do provide quite a bit of ground clearance underneath.

One thing to note about these axles is that they use actual working differentials they're not locked up so the differentials will have free spinning motion to help enhance the driving performance of the truck. If you want this to perform and act more like a trail truck you're going to have to go in there and lock those differentials up yourself.

On Road

When driving this rig in the way that it's set up it feels more like a proper on-road vehicle than a rock crawler or trail truck. On the higher traction pavement outside the truck remains really flat as it drives around. It doesn't want to lean a whole lot because of those sway bars. If you do push it hard enough and kind of get the rear end loose you can slide it just right and get one of the tires to lift up and diff out that rear end, but the truck mostly drives flat—it turns flat, it stays flat.

Off Road

When driving off-road the truck performs all right thanks to its 4WD drive system. Every once in a while, these small, hard, low profile rubber tires do spit out on the terrain, they don't contour so well like proper rock crawler tires do, so they're a bit harder on the uneven surface. In off-road there tends to be more wheel spin, more diffing out, more of a struggle to just find the traction and momentum.

CEN Ford F-450 Transmitter

As we mentioned the top speed for the truck isn't that high and that's okay, fast speeds aren't really the intended application of this truck. This truck is meant to pull your other 1/10 scale rigs with ease and that's why the transmission comes geared low. Having four tires on the rear axle or a dually setup as it's sometimes referred too even further promotes the Super Duty loading and hauling capabilities of this truck. It's definitely a truck you would probably walk with or behind as it hauls your gear and your crawler.

The one downside we found with the truck happened to be the transmitter range. When we did our speed runs, we probably took the truck 50 to 100 feet away from us and it did lose signal with the transmitter. A mentioned earlier, most people will use this truck walking either alongside or behind it, so you're going to be right there with the truck and not have any transmitter issues, but if you are outside bashing around you probably aren't going to want to drive it too far away.

Trailers for your CEN Ford F-450

As far as actually adding trailers to the truck there are a few options available like the massive RC4WD Boat Trailer or the Xtra Speed Dual Axle Trailer and then there is the smaller Yeah Racing Leaf Spring Trailer. Just for the fun of it we put the Axial SCX-24 in the bed of the truck.

There is a hitch attached on that rear chassis brace but it's not technically a bumper. The problem with that is it's probably a few inches or centimeters away from the outside of the body so you need a pretty long trailer hitch to extend all that weight under the body and then poke out on the outside.